KARL AMADEUS HARTMANN: Das Klavierwerk = Kleine Suite I; Kleine Suite II; Toccata; Fugue; Sonatina; First Sonata; Sonata “27 April 1945” – Benedikt Koehlen, piano – Telos Music TLS 055 [Distrib. by Naxos], 70:43 ****:
The German composer Karl Amadeus Hartmann (1905-1963) is an enigma on just about every score. First there is the matter of his reputation. He is often called the greatest German of the twentieth century. Some critics even claim he is the most important symphonist after Mahler, yet Hartmann’s eight symphonies are virtually unknown outside Germany. Instead, his most famous composition, though hardly well-known itself, is the Concerto Funebre for violin and strings.
As a life-long socialist who adamantly opposed the Nazi regime, he was one of the few German artists untainted by fascism and so became instrumental in rebuilding Germany’s musical life after World War II. He was notable for his support of a whole generation of contemporary European composers. Yet Hartmann himself found few champions for his symphonic compositions, so only now is he being heard with any frequency in the concert halls and on recordings.
Then there is matter of Hartmann’s style. Early on, he was attracted to the Expressionism of Schoenberg and his followers and later showed sympathy for twelve-tone technique, going so far as to study with Anton von Webern during the Second World War. However, he didn’t warm to or adopt Webern’s style. Instead, Hartmann’s style is an odd fusion, or attempt at fusion, of Expressionism and neoclassicism, along with debts to composers as divergent as Alban Berg and Bela Bartók.
Hartmann was severely self-critical. Perhaps because he came to view himself as primarily a symphonist who had perfected his symphonic voice only late in his career, he suppressed most of his early work, including all of the piano music on the current CD except for the Sonata “27 April 1945.”
Thus it’s difficult to get a complete picture of K. A. Hartmann; certainly, the picture that emerges from listening to the piano works is a conflicting one. If the earliest compositions (the two Suites and the Toccata and Fugue) suggest one composer as influence, that composer is clearly Paul Hindemith. The pieces all have the motoric drive and seeming machine-like objectivity of Hindemith at his most severe. But there is always a strange undercurrent of angst in Hartmann that hints at deeper wells of emotion. Even the Toccata and Fugue, which features a highly-stylized approach to jazz, is singularly unsmiling and unbending—and it certainly doesn’t swing. But it does have a manic energy verging on the barbaric. Increasingly, Bartók, in his Allegro Barbaro vein, seems to replace Hindemith as an influence in Hartmann’s aesthetic.
As the evocation of Baroque forms such as toccata and fugue implies, Hartmann also had a penchant for counterpoint, such as in the quirky Sehr lebhaft second movement of the Kleine Suite I, where the right hand and left hand play countermelodies that often go in retrograde directions, the left at the middle of the keyboard, the right at the very top. It must be tough to play.
With so many contrasting influences going on, Hartmann’s piano music doesn’t evince a strong individual voice, with the exception of the powerful second Sonata, which was Hartmann’s reaction to a horror he witnessed at the very end of the war. On April 27-28, 1945, he saw prisoners from the death camp at Dachau being marched away to avoid liberation by the invading Allied armies. Hartmann heard stragglers being shot and saw first-hand the brutality of the guards, the emaciation and tormented agony of the prisoners. The conflicting moods that Hartmann experienced unfold in this work, from the stunned quiet of the opening, to the manic hope for the future of the second movement Presto assai, to the funeral march of the third. Throughout, Hartmann quotes snippets of socialist working songs to express his solidarity with the prisoners and their cause.
In the Sonata “27 April 1945,” Hartmann managed to find a stylistic correlative for the emotional states he wanted to convey in his music. So here at last a steely, well-tooled surface doesn’t appear to obscure the inner anguish and turmoil. At the same time, Hartmann had found his true voice in the symphonic realm, so he abandoned piano music entirely, even attempting later to suppress his most forceful composition for the instrument, which nonetheless proved to have a life of its own.
The pieces on this disc show a definite progression from the Suites of 1927, when Hartmann was still a music student at the Munich Academy, through the First Sonata of 1932, to the important Second Sonata of 1945. So they’re interesting to hear as signposts in the development of a significant twentieth-century composer. Fortunately, they’re interesting in their own right as well, even the early practice pieces, addicted though they are to Hindemith’s piano style. There are enough individual touches, and of course that undercurrent of emotional unrest, to make them worth hearing.
Koehlen’s performances are technically beyond cavil. He has the ability to address Hartmann’s steeliest and rapidest passages with a fearless concentration that is commendable. Nor does he slight the dark brooding of Hartmann’s slow movements, where Hartmann most tellingly maps the contours of his inner consciousness. Captured in an exemplary studio recording, these performances provide valuable insight into an important musical genesis.
– Lee Passarella
